• Chances are that you've found yourself completely out of mobile phone range on a number of occasions. Help may be at hand though, as Australian researchers have figured out a way to make mobile phones talk to each other, without using mobile phone base stations:

"The three-person team, led by Flinders University's Paul Gardner-Stephen... headed into the remote, sparsely populated Arkaroola Sanctuary over the weekend to test their Serval Project with hacked Android phones. Results were promising, with Gardner-Stephen chatting with a colleague on another mobile phone several hundred metres (about a quarter of a mile) away.

"The Serval Project involves fitting phones with open-source software called Distributed Numbering Architecture (DNA) that essentially turns phones' Wi-Fi capability into a mini tower and lets them connect with other phones to form their own network. The software lets people use their existing phone numbers so they can be reached easily."

Leslie Katz says the researchers see enormous potential in their system for helping out in disaster relief, or situations where no telephone network exists:

"By integrating DNA with hardware called 'mesh potatoes' developed by Village Telco, Gardner-Stephen and his team say they will be able to provide telephone access to millions of people who currently lack affordable telephone coverage, as well as help those affected by disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, and the like."

• One thing you might hope to have with a back-up gadget is reliability. However, Apple has admitted that there is a problem with a number of its Time Capsule wireless back-up devices, which The Guardian says gave up the ghost around 18 months after first being used:

"Owners of units whose serial number lies within the range of XX807XXXXXX - XX814XXXXXX can get them repaired or replaced free of charge, by post or in person - though to save your data you'll have to take it to an Apple Store or authorised retailer so that they can retain the data from the hard drive."

Charles Arthur says that the problem came to light in part thanks to a collective effort to track serial numbers for broken Time Capsules, run by Pim van Bochoven:

"Van Bochoven's Time Capsule Memorial Register was launched in October of the same year [2009] to provide a crowdsourced official record of the serial numbers and lifespans of broken devices, which totalled 2,500 doomed devices before he stopped updating the site in February 2010, having reached 2,500 dead devices (plus a number of "prank" submissions from Windows users, whose attempts were evident from the incorrect serial numbers offered - come on, people)."

It's been a difficult time for Apple lately. The recall comes at the same time as news that the respected Consumer Reports magazine in the US could not recommend the iPhone 4. The magazine praised the phone for many of its new features, but carried out tests, confirming that the phone does lose reception when held in a particular way. It also offered a low-cost fix:

"We did... find an affordable solution for suffering iPhone 4 users: Cover the antenna gap with a piece of duct tape or another thick, non-conductive material. It may not be pretty, but it works."

• Google has launched a supposedly easy-to-use software package to help novices create applications for phones running its Android operating system. But TechCrunch reckons the software is not going to be quite as easy as publicity suggests:

"I spent around 90 minutes this morning cranking away on a few test applications in App Inventor, and while I'm very excited about it, this is not going to be a walk in the park for 'ordinary people'. Unless you're looking to make an extremely basic application -- think 'Hello World' -- you're going to have to read through the documentation, and in some cases even the existing tutorials won't be enough. That said, this will be absolutely perfect for the classroom environment for which it's been tested in."

Jason Kincaid's whole article is well worth a read for any budding novice app creators.

• It is sometimes suggested that citizen journalists will be able to fill the void left by local newspapers, which are increasingly closing their doors as a result of advertising money being transferred to the web. Ars Technica has been examining a recent survey of citizen journalism sites, which compared them with "legacy" newspaper websites:

"Summing up, the authors paint a fairly grim picture of the state of local news. 'Despite hopes for a thriving genre of citizen journalism as at least a partial replacement for legacy journalism, those hopes have not been realized,' they conclude. 'In content and coverage, CitJ [citizen journalism] lags behind legacy web sites on a variety of dimensions considered indicative of news quality.'"

But John Timmer is not convinced by the conclusions:

"For starters, it appears that fans of traditional media should celebrate the results: legacy sites have identified many of the promising participatory features of citizen journalism, and embraced them. Discussions, content hosting, and online interactivity all feature prominently on the legacy sites now.

"The authors' judgement may also be overly harsh when it comes to citizen journalism. Even if a given site is limited by a lack of features or resources, savvy users can easily recognize the limitations and use the site accordingly, supplementing it with other sources as needed."

Finally, Mars Daily reports news of a new way to view the red planet:

"Today, Microsoft Research and NASA are providing an entirely new experience to users of the WorldWide Telescope, which will allow visitors to interact with and explore our solar system like never before. Viewers can now take exclusive interactive tours of the red planet, hear directly from NASA scientists, and view and explore the most complete, highest-resolution coverage of Mars available."

WorldWide Telescope users have a choice of downloading and installing a piece of software to access the detailed images, or going via a web application.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Leslie Katz | CNet News | Cell phone chats - in the Australian Outback?
• Charles Arthur | Guardian Technology Blog | Apple finally admits problems with Time Capsule and offers replacement
• Mike Gikas | Consumer Reports Electronics Blog | Why Consumer Reports Can't Recommend the iPhone 4
• Jason Kincaid | TechCrunch | It's Alive! Taking Android's App Inventor For A Spin
• John Timmer | Ars Technica | Citizen journalism not making up for loss of local newspapers
• Mars Daily | MS and NASA Bring Mars Down to Earth

• A New York firm has figured out a way to recycle plastic bottles into yarn and fabric, according to Buzz Beast:

"The company is called Bionic Yarn, and the brand name is a perfect representation of what the company stands for. Bionic Yarn has durability, strength, and a refined quality. It is available in either yarn or fabric form with primary applications in backpacks, luggage, handbags, active/outdoor apparel, work wear, casual apparel / denim, footwear, and home / outdoor furnishings."

The yarns are neither easy to make, nor entirely recycled, instead mixing more traditional materials with plastic bottle leftovers:

"The Bionic yarn constructing is achieved by covering a PETE (recycled plastic) corespun yarn in a helix formation with two surface filament layers in opposite directions. This creates a counterforce on each component and there by binds them together, having an effect similar to a 'Chinese finger trap.' This in turn creates an extremely durable fabric. The alternate fibres used in the core and the helix of bionic hlx yarn are nylon, high tenacity polyester, lycra, and cotton."

• Billionaire investor Warren Buffett, is apparently a big fan of YouTube. After Mr Buffett suggested that he should be paying YouTube for the pleasure, they announced a special new type of account via the YouTube blog:

"The 'Oracle of Omaha' also suggested that YouTube should be charging him 'a lot of money' based on the enjoyment he gets from YouTube. We agree and are happy to announce a new subscription offering: YouTube Pro. Pro will be offered for a limited time at the low price of $100 million/year. We don't expect to sell many, but if Mr. Buffett wants to make sure he's paying his fair share, we take cash, credit and, for him, personal check."

The blog also offered a big *Wink* to its readers, to be sure they knew it was only a joke!

• When Google announced turn-by-turn satellite navigation for its Android-enabled smartphones, some observers predicted the possible demise of sat-nav companies like Garmin and TomTom. The Guardian Technology Blog points out that Garmin is now fighting back, and has highlighted the potential cost to a European traveller of all the data-roaming it would take to keep an Android phone's map up to date:

"Using Google Maps on an O2 Pay As You Go tariff, the company set out to see how much a summer tour of France would cost with only an Android phone for company... A return Calais-to-Paris (185 miles) trip by car notched up £74 of data roaming charges, using 12-13 megabytes of data."

Though O2 says that the figures Garmin provided overstated the actual cost of data-roaming:

"An O2 spokesperson, unavailable when contacted before publishing, told us: 'Those figures are incorrect. O2 charges £3 per MB, so 12-13 MB would cost £39 at most. Once you reach £40 per month, O2 stops charging you until you reach 50 MB. We then offer you the high user bolt-on, which gives you up to 200 MB for £120.'"

• Finally for today, news of the imminent closure of the Facebook virtual gift shop, where you can 'buy' birthday cakes, kittens and flowers to post on your Facebook friends' walls. CNet takes up the story:

"The social network announced Thursday that its Gift Shop--the feature it launched in 2007 that allows users to send personalized items to friends on the network--will close on August 1 to allow the company to focus on improving other features. Gifts that users receive before that date will continue to appear on their pages, and users will still be able to use third-party applications to send and receive greeting cards and other items."

Facebook said in a blog post that it was giving up the gift shop to focus on more commonly used features on its site. But the financial impact is difficult to discern, as Steven Musil explains:

"As a privately held company, Facebook isn't required to publish financial performance information, so it's unknown how this feature may have financially benefited the site. But many expected the virtual-goods feature to be a cash cow for Facebook as gifts generally cost $1 (or 10 credits) to send. However large that revenue, it probably can't hold a cupcake's candle to the $835 million in revenue social games like Farmville are expected to generate this year."

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Buzz Beast | Pharrell Williams x Bionic Yarn
• Hunter Walk | YouTube blog | Announcing YouTube Pro *Wink*
• Josh Halliday | Guardian Technology Blog | Google's satnav killer - satnav fights back
• Steven Musil | CNet | Facebook to close its Gift Shop

• Orkut is a Google-owned social network that lags well behind Facebook in most countries. That is, except Brazil and India, where Orkut has always been significantly more popular. Change is in the air though, because Facebook is catching up fast in India, according to Techcrunch:

"In May, 2010, Facebook attracted 18 million unique visitors in India, compared to Orkut's 19.7 million (comScore). In the past year, Facebook grew 177 percent from 6.5 million Indian visitors, compared to 35 percent growth for Orkut. When the June numbers come out, Facebook may very well surpass Orkut in that country. Indeed, Google's own Trends for websites shows Facebook edging out Orkut in India last month."

Erick Schonfeld points out that Orkut can rest easy in Brazil for the moment, where it still has 29 million visitors a month, compared to Facebook's eight million.

• Meanwhile, no Facebook visitors in any country will be seeing adverts for the upcoming film The Social Network, which tells one version of the story of the rise of the site. As All Things Digital explains, you might expect Facebook users to be a golden marketing opportunity for such a movie:

"Maybe not so much. 'Facebook's advertising guidelines don't allow ads to reference the company unless Facebook has cooperated with the object of the ad,' said Steve Elzer, SVP of Media Relations for Sony (SNE) movie unit Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, in response to a BoomTown query. 'So, we won't be advertising there given these parameters.'"

Kara Swisher explains that advertising policy or not, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is also not a fan of the film:

"No wonder the privacy-challenged Facebook is not having any of it, especially since Zuckerberg publicly expressed distaste for the film in a recent onstage interview at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference. He also told me in a conversation there that he dreads its release, because of inaccuracies in the book it was based on."

The Social Network is due out this autumn.

• Filesharers beware - hackers appear to have breached security at the popular file sharing site The Pirate Bay, to reveal details of more than four million of the site's users, according to Krebs on Security:

"An Argentinian hacker named Ch Russo said he and two of his associates discovered multiple SQL injection vulnerabilities that let them into the user database for the site. Armed with this access, the hackers had the ability to create, delete, modify or view all user information, including the number and name of file trackers or torrents uploaded by users."

Brian Krebs says the hacker and his associates realised that anti-piracy groups would love to get their hands on the data:

"Russo maintains that at no time did he or his associates alter or delete information in The Pirate Bay database. But he acknowledges that they did briefly consider how much this access and information would be worth to anti-piracy companies employed by entertainment industry lobbying groups like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), each of which has assiduously sought to sink The Pirate Bay on grounds that the network facilitates copyright infringement."

• ZDNet reports that the mobile phone company Nokia has appealed to the Russian authorities for help tracking down a prototype of its upcoming flagship N8 phone, which was reviewed by Russian blogger Eldar Murtazin shortly before it was formally announced in April:

"Murtazin, the editor-in-chief of Mobile-Review.com, 'has been very public about his possession of unauthorised Nokia property', the Finnish handset manufacturer said in a statement. 'We have asked Mr. Murtazin for the return of all Nokia property in his possession. As he has declined to reply, we asked the Russian authorities to assist us.'"

It's a case that has echoes of Apple's approach to recovering the prototype of the iPhone 4 which fell into the hands of tech blog Gizmodo earlier this year. Nokia is adamant though that it is not taking this stand because Mr Murtazin was critical of the phone in his review. And David Meyer points out that Mr Murtazin has a different perspective on the story compared to the phone maker:

"In a series of tweets, Murtazin appeared to dispute Nokia's account of events, suggesting that he had indeed replied to the company's communications and arguing that Nokia had no evidence to back up their claims. 'Actually i know a lot about internal life of companies, so drama could be good :),' he said in one of the most recent tweets."

• Wrapping things up for today, beware users of Chatroulette, the popular site which lets you talk at random with a stranger via webcam. Notwithstanding the well-known risk with the site of finding a chat partner in some state of undress, you might end up in an art exhibition, as Mashable explains:

"Instead of being connected to another human being, the Chatroulette user on the other end of this program would just see themselves upside down, which references the mythical character Narcissus seeing his reflection in a body of water. Between February and May, several thousand people were captured for this art project. We don't know whether these people have given their permission for the use of their likeness; still, the results are interesting."

The short films have been edited and gathered together into a lively montage, which illustrates the users' response to their moment of recognition.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Erick Schonfeld | TechCrunch | Orkut About to Fall to Facebook in India
• Kara Swisher | All Things Digital | Facebook Movie Won't be Advertising on Facebook
• Brian Krebs | Krebs on Security | Pirate Bay Hack Exposes User Booty
• David Meyer | ZDNet | Nokia goes after Russian blogger in prototype row
• Jolie O'Dell | Mashable | Chatroulette Spawns Art Gallery Exhibit, "Narcissus"

• Ever since the microblogging site Twitter rose through the internet's popularity rankings, observers have pondered how the site will ever make any money. It recently started allowing advertisers to sponsor "Promoted Trends" and "Promoted Tweets", and has now introduced an account that users can follow, which will offer special offers to Twitter users, as The Guardian explains:

"After what seems like a lifetime, the company has now officially announced EarlyBird, which aims to inform users of special promotions that are unique to Twitter and the account. Selected advertisers will pay to distribute offers to the thousands of users present on the network, although none of these has yet been named. The offers will be time sensitive, so fast action will be needed to catch that particular worm."

Users will have to follow the account themselves, rather than being automatically signed up. But Sebastian Payne thinks that is unlikely to be an obstacle to success:

"The opportunity for EarlyBird to go viral is huge, with offers potentially spreading around like internet like wildfire - if they are deemed worthy enough. As I type, the account has 9,545 followers, something that will need to multiply infinitely for the scheme to be successful. Thanks to the joys of trends and retweeting, this seems likely. Assuming the followers flood in, Twitter will be closer to long-term sustainability."

• Open-source web browser firm Mozilla has unveiled the first beta of version four of its popular Firefox browser. Mashable reckons it's a major upgrade:

"It not only includes a redesign of the user interface (tabs are now on top except for the Mac version), but a wave of additional features, including enhanced HTML5 support, hardware-accelerated HD video, WebSockets and enhanced add-on support via Jetpack."

Firefox has been losing market share to Google's Chrome in recent months, so it will be interesting to see whether the latest version reverses that trend. Whilst you can download and start to use the software now, Ben Parr points out that it is still likely to be unstable:

"This is an early beta of the browser -- it will crash and frustrate you, which is exactly what Mozilla is hoping to catch now before its final release."

• Have you ever harboured dreams of being a film-maker? If so, YouTube wants to hear from you, and is offering a chance for your film material to make it into a global documentary, to be directed by a major film-maker, and screened at next year's Sundance Film Festival. The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy takes up the story:

"Producer/director Ridley Scott, director Kevin Macdonald ("The Last King of Scotland" ) and YouTube are teaming up to create and produce a user content-driven documentary to debut at next year's fest. Entitled "Life in a Day," the film experiment asks users to upload short video snapshops and intimate moments from their lives -- specifically from July 24 -- to a designated channel on YouTube."

It's a fascinating idea, and as Michelle Kung points out, it is impossible to know what the final film will look like:

"Macdonald, who brainstormed the concept for 'Life in a Day' after meeting with Ridley Scott's production company Scott Free, says the vagaries of the project are what he finds the most intriguing. 'I'm excited by the lack of control,' he says. 'I'm laying out the ground rules [for the project] as much as possible, but am just going to have to wait and see... Everything depends on how much people will contribute. I don't know if I'm more afraid of getting too much content or too little.'"

• NASA is trying its hand at science fiction, by collaborating on a free computer game that lets players visit the moon, to try and save the astronauts who are attempting to colonise it. Kotaku explains the idea:

"The player in Moonbase Alpha takes on the role of an astronaut returning from a jaunt on the surface, just in time to witness a meteorite disable the base's life support systems. You and your team (the game features online multiplayer) have to coordinate your efforts in order to get the life support systems up and running, or just give up and let everyone die a horrible death."

Mike Fahey explains that this is just the precursor to a fully-fledged massively multiplayer online role-playing game from NASA, which was announced last February.

• Finally, for today, CNN reports that Hong Kong-based Wicked Lasers has incurred the wrath of Star Wars-creator George Lucas's Lucasfilm, over a laser that the company says resembles a lightsaber:

"Lucasfilm Ltd. has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Hong Kong-based Wicked Lasers, threatening legal action if it doesn't change its Pro Arctic Laser series or stop selling it altogether. 'It is apparent from the design of the Pro Arctic Laser that it was intended to resemble the hilts of our lightsaber swords, which are protected by copyright ... ,' said the letter, dated last month and provided to CNN by Wicked Lasers."

Doug Gross reports that the CEO of Wicked Lasers, Steve Liu, claims never to have compared his products to the Jedi weapon used in the Star Wars films. And Lucasfilm appears to acknowledge that in the letter itself:

"The cease-and-desist letter doesn't accuse Wicked of using the term 'lightsaber' in its marketing ... But it notes coverage from technology blogs that have frequently made that comparison ... 'These references make it clear that the public is being led to believe that the Pro Arctic Laser is an official lightsaber device and/or copied from our design,' the Lucasfilm letter said."

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Sebastian Payne | Guardian Technology Blog | Twitter: EarlyBird catches the tweets
• Ben Parr | Mashable | Firefox 4 Beta 1 Released
• Michelle Kung | WSJ Speakeasy | YouTube Documentary 'Life in a Day' to Employ User-Generated Content, Debut at Sundance 2011
• Mike Fahey | Kotaku | NASA Invites Gamers to Explore Moonbase Alpha
• Doug Gross | CNN | 'Star Wars' creator says laser too much like lightsaber

• Visitors to the London Underground live map, which should show the location of all London trains in real time, and which we mentioned on Tech Brief last week are being greeted with a message that the Transport for London feed is not currently working, so the map does not have any trains to show. The London DataStore blog confirms that the feed has been knocked out by the sheer volume of people looking at the map and other apps that use the data:

"Owing to overwhelming demand by apps that use the service, the London Underground feed has had to be temporarily suspended. We hope to restore the service as soon as possible but this may take some days. We will keep everyone informed of progress..."

Depending on your perspective, it's either a massive sign of success for open data, or a signal that the London data store has not got powerful enough computers.

• Another day, another dig at Apple over its iPhone that can sometimes lose reception when you hold it a certain way. After Nokia published a blog entry earlier this week with suggestions on how to hold its phones (all of which, it said, do not deteriorate your phone signal), The Register points out that Motorola has been taking out full page adverts in US newspapers for its Droid phones, with a similar message:

"In the advert -- underneath a photo of Motorola's upcoming Droid X, complete with the obligatory comely lass -- is a paragraph of advertising copy extolling the Android phone's features. One part of that exaltation is this sentence: 'And most importantly, it comes with a double antenna design. The kind that allows you to hold the phone any way you like and use it just about anywhere to make crystal clear calls.'"

• More seriously for Apple perhaps, though, is the news that class action, or group lawsuits are beginning to roll in against the company and service provider AT&T over the problems with phone signal quality:

"The lawsuit accuses Apple of Defect in Design, Manufacture and Assembly, as well as Breach of Express Warranty. It also makes several claims against both Apple and AT&T, including General Negligence, Deceptive Trade Practices, Intentional Misrepresentation, Negligent Misrepresentation and Fraud by Concealment."

Stan Schroeder reckons it's difficult to predict which way any such case might go:

"Due to the complexity of the issue, and the fact that some other phones exhibit a similar behavior, it's hard to guess what the outcome of this lawsuit will be. However, it might spur Apple to start working on this problem quickly -- before it escalates into something far more serious."

• Microsoft had begun to get used to the fact that its Internet Explorer browser, whilst still the world's favourite, was steadily falling down the popularity charts. That was until last month, when as CNet points out, according to analytics company Net Applications, all of a sudden it picked up from 59.8% to 60.3%, seemingly at the expense of rival Firefox:

"The change in fortunes was significant enough that Microsoft couldn't resist crowing about IE's progress in a blog post Thursday. 'We certainly don't judge our business on just two months of data, but the direction here is encouraging,' said Ryan Gavin, senior director of business and marketing for Internet Explorer ... Some of IE8's gains probably can be ascribed to the growing use of Windows 7, which ships with that browser and is showing some signs of finally being a successor to Windows XP that people actually are embracing."

• To round things off for today, a brief mention of a new monthly podcast bringing together, we hope, the best that the BBC Tech team has to offer, with Public Radio International's Clark Boyd. It's not a BBC programme, but we at the BBC are taking part. Hope that's clear.

"For a while now, I've wanted to start a monthly round-up of interesting tech stories. I finally managed to strong-arm BBC Technology Reporter Jonathan Fildes into helping me out. He went the extra mile by giving me the perfect podcast opening: 'Crikey, have we rambled enough now, Clark?'"

So, have I rambled on enough yet? I think so.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Lisa Price| London DataStore blog | Tube Feed Update
• Rik Myslewski | The Register | Motorola advert revels in anti-iPhone schadenfreude
• Stan Schroeder | Mashable | Apple and AT&T Slapped With an iPhone 4 Class-Action Lawsuit
• Stephen Shankland | CNet DeepTech | IE reverses usage share slide; Microsoft gloats
• Clark Boyd | The World Tech Podcast | Our new monthly tech round-up

• Orkut, Wave, Buzz, the list of Google's attempts to break into social networking may be on the verge of growing yet again, at least so reports TechCrunch, quoting Facebook's former chief technology officer, Adam D'Angelo:

"Yesterday, Digg CEO Kevin Rose tweeted that he'd heard a 'huge rumor' that Google was planning to launch a Facebook competitor called 'Google Me', sparking off a wave of speculative reports (Rose has since removed the tweet). Now Adam D'Angelo, who was Facebook's CTO for years and is now founder of hot Q&A service Quora, is weighing in with more details. And from what he's hearing, Google Me is indeed very real, and it's gunning for Facebook."

If true, Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch is sceptical about Google's ability to take on the social networking giant:

"Even if Google has an amazing site in the pipeline, creating the next Facebook is going to be easier said than done -- nearly 500 million people already have their content stored on Facebook, and despite what Facebook has claimed about being open, I doubt they'll make it easy for anyone to jump into the arms of a competitor. Not to mention the fact that Google has had shortcomings with its social sites like Buzz, Wave, and Orkut."

• Foursquare, the web service that lets you update your friends with where you are, has plugged a hole that potentially enabled anyone to find out where you were. Wired explains how a programmer named Jesper Andersen identified the problem:

"On pages like the one for San Francisco's Ferry Building, Foursquare shows a random grid of 50 pictures of users who most-recently checked in at that location -- no matter what their privacy settings. When a new check-in occurs, the site includes that person's photo somewhere in the grid. So Andersen built a custom scraper that loaded the Foursquare web page for each location in San Francisco, looked for the differences and logged the changes."

Wired also quotes an e-mail from Foursquare programmer Jon Hoffman explaining how the hole came about:

"The privacy leak on the venue page was something that was overlooked when we added privacy-protection features to the 'who's here now' section of the venue page on the mobile clients (the data that's exposed via the API)," Hoffman wrote Tuesday morning. "There already is a privacy toggle on the /settings page to control privacy for that feature, but it did not extend to the 'who's been here' section of the venue page on the website. We've recently locked down the 'who's been here' section so that it respects the 'Who's here' privacy toggle."

• Slashdot is reporting a voicemail security hole in the Android mobile phone platform, when coupled with AT&T's mobile phone network, which takes advantage of software which mimics, or "spoofs" another person's caller ID:

"If the target has not added a voicemail password (the default is no password), you will be dropped into a random menu of their voicemail and eventually can drill up or down to get what you want. You can change greetings, erase messages, send voicemails out of the target account, and much more. How many politicians up in arms about Google Wi-Fi sniffing will want to know more about this?"

• Who knows, but perhaps Google, which created Android, will consider remotely killing the software that allows users to spoof another person's mobile phone number. The Register points out that it did just that for the first time recently with a two pieces of software masquerading as movie preview apps that were actually written to expose some holes in the Android platform:

"The announcement came by way of a blog post from Android security lead Rich Cannings. 'After the researcher voluntarily removed these applications from Android Market, we decided, per the Android Market Terms of Service, to exercise our remote application removal feature on the remaining installed copies to complete the cleanup,' Cannings said."

Whilst some are likely to be concerned about Google's ability to remove applications, this sounds like it might be a smart way for Google to deal with malicious software on Android phones. However, the company also has a command that can remotely install applications. Jon Oberheide, the programmer who exposed the original problem to Google, told The Register that it worries him:

"It may be possible to spoof these INSTALL_ASSET messages to deliver a malicious application payload. If Google's GTalkService servers were compromised, the malicious impact would obviously be a bit more widespread ... You better believe that myself and others are taking a careful look at these code paths."

• Finally, for today, a follow-up to a story we mentioned in a recent Tech Brief. BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT has revealed the winner of its search for the "ultimate information pioneer" of all time. The winner? Alan Turing, code-breaker extraordinaire, and a pioneer of Artificial Intelligence:

"Celebrity Kate Russell, who fronted a short film in support of Turing's bid, said: 'I was thrilled that Alan Turing took such an early lead, even managing to fight off a sudden dash from Hedy Lamarr in week two of the voting! The fact that the votes for Turing have remained steady over the course of a month, securing him a solid victory, goes to show that his appeal and importance to the world of technology is as universal as his early machines were!'"

And Kate Russell's film about Alan Turing can still be viewed at the BCS website.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Jason Kincaid | TechCrunch | 'Google Me' is real, and it's gunning for Facebook
• Ryan Singel | Wired | White Hat Uses Foursquare Privacy Hole to Capture 875K Check-Ins
• Slashdot | Hack AT&T Voicemail With Android
• Cade Metz | The Register | Google can kill or install apps on citizen Androids
• Andrew Wooden | PCR-Online | Alan Turing voted 'ulitmate information pioneer'

• The blogosphere is excited about the leak of what appear to be documents illustrating Microsoft's early thinking about the future of Windows. Whilst the company is not commenting, the slides indicate possible facial recognition technology in future editions, as well as a little envy about Apple's success, according to Stephen Chapman at Microsoft Kitchen:

"There appears to be considerable planning taking place as to how a user will access Windows. Right off the bat, one of my favorites is [a] prototype which shows a user logging in via facial recognition! Basically, you enroll your face, then all you should have to do from that point forward is sit down, have your webcam get a look at you and then log you in based on facial recognition."

If so, presumably the boffins in Redmond have thought through how to avoid someone logging in by simply holding up a photo of a person whose computer they want to hack in to! The documents also indicate that Microsoft may be a little jealous of Apple's success with customers, as Mr Chapman explains:

"Included in these presentations is a rather telling (but obvious) slide which shows that Microsoft is clearly paying attention to Apple while planning Windows 8. Titled, 'How Apple does it: A virtuous cycle,' Microsoft has broken down Apple's UX/Brand Loyalty cycle and cited its value. Though it's fairly obvious, the takeaway here is that Microsoft is aiming to give Windows the very same 'it just works' status that Apple's products are known for."

• The New York Times has been poring over court documents released in a civil case being pursued against Dell in the US, over computers that the firm allegedly sold knowing they were likely to break down:

"Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that the company's employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk. Even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers, according to e-mail messages revealed in the dispute."

Dell declined to comment on the case to the New York Times, and it has yet to come to trial. But Ashlee Vance highlights some interesting discussions between Dell employees:

"In one e-mail exchange between Dell customer support employees concerning computers at the Simpson Thacher & Bartlett law firm, a Dell worker states, 'We need to avoid all language indicating the boards were bad or had 'issues' per our discussion this morning.' ... In other documents about how to handle questions around the faulty OptiPlex systems, Dell salespeople were told, 'Don't bring this to customer's attention proactively' and 'Emphasize uncertainty.'"

• Over at The Guardian, Charles Arthur is exercised by some bizarre terms and conditions imposed on users of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe website. The terms are drafted in such a way that just reading them implies your assent. But most notably perhaps, you apparently need the organisers' permission even if you want to just link to one of its pages:

"About linking by hypertext to our website: Before providing a link to our site you must seek our permission. To do this, email admin@edfringe.com with details of the URL to which you wish to link and the URL of the page on which you will be displaying the link. We do not permit the display of our web pages in any HTMLl [sic] frame unless we have expressly authorised this."

The organisers told the Guardian that the Fringe website's terms and conditions are kept under review.

• In the battle for web access supremacy, Google's web browser Chrome appears to have passed an important milestone in the United States, by beating Apple's Safari browser to become third most popular in the country for the first time:

"Chrome nabbed the spot with an 8.97 percent share, following behind Internet Explorer with 52 percent and Firefox with 28.5 percent. Safari ranked fourth according to their stats with 8.88 percent. Globally Chrome has been in third place for some time, but this is the first time it's surpassed Safari in the United States."

Finally, for today, after Apple's much reported issues over iPhone signal declining when the latest model is held in a particular way, Nokia have taken the opportunity to gloat a little about the fact you can hold their phones any way you want, and highlight a few popular styles, like the "Four Edge Grip":

"Regardless of the size of your hands, the Four Edge Grip (FEG, for short) is a universal grip which involves all of your fingers and thumb, each having hold of one edge of the device (the middle and ring fingers actually double up to provide an opposing force to the much stronger thumb). You'll find a little gap develops between the back of the phone and the palm, which is useful. For something."

JBC goes on to have a little dig at Nokia's rival, Apple:

"Providing a wide range of methods and grips for people to hold their phones, without interfering with the antennae, has been an essential feature of every device Nokia has built ... Of course, feel free to ignore all of the above because realistically, you're free to hold your Nokia device any way you like. And you won't suffer any signal loss. Cool, huh?"

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Stephen Chapman | Microsoft Kitchen | Windows 8 Plans Leaked: Numerous Details Revealed
• Ashlee Vance | New York Times | In Suit Over Faulty Computers, Window to Dell's Fall
• Charles Arthur | Guardian Technology Blog | Please don't read this post about the Edinburgh Fringe site
• Laura June | Engadget | Chrome overtakes Safari for number three browser spot in the US
• JBC | Nokia Conversations | How do you hold your Nokia?

• Germany's justice minister has requested that Apple opens its databases to German data protection authorities, following a change in the company's privacy policy:

"'Users of iPhones and other GPS devices must be aware of what kind of information about them is being collected,' Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger told the German weekly [Der Spiegel]."

It is the introduction of a clause that allows Apple to anonymously collect data on the geographic location of its users that concerns Ms Leuthesser-Schnarrenberger:

"The justice minister said it would be 'unthinkable' for Apple to create personality- or location-based user profiles... 'Apple has the obligation to properly implement the transparency so often promised by (CEO) Steve Jobs,' she said."

• You might say "it shouldn't happen to a computer security firm", but according to Softpedia, several of Symantec's websites are vulnerable to attack from hackers:

"One of the flaws is located in a language selection field on symantec.com/connect/, a site dedicated to the company's community of business customers and partners. A second one is found in a feedback form loaded from seer.entsupport.symantec.com, a subdomain associated with the knowledge base for enterprise products. The third one is in the German section on the service1.symantec.com subdomain, which is part of international support site."

Lucian Constantin says the type of vulnerability, called XSS, and uncovered in this case by a researcher calling himself d3v1l, is a common problem on the internet:

"Cross-site scripting, also known as XSS, is one of the most common type of vulnerabilities on the internet today. The bugs stem from a failure to properly sanitize input passed via forms, giving attackers the ability to pass content that gets interpreted as code... Fortunately, the vulnerabilities discovered by d3v1l are non-persistent in nature and can only be exploited by opening a malformed URL. However, these flaws can still be leveraged to enhance attacks, especially since they are located on the website of a trusted security vendor."

• If you're one of those people who likes the technological peace and quiet of underground railway services, London may not be the place for you in the future. Broadband Expert says, Mayor Boris Johnson is keen to see wi-fi internet hotspots in London Underground stations soon:

"He said: 'The truth is that I'm on the side of progress if we possibly can do it. We could do it because I do think people want the facility of looking at their BlackBerrys.'"

Although London would only be playing catch-up with a dynamic counterpart in the United Arab Emirates, where a Wimax network reportedly enables internet access across the whole of the Dubai Metro.

• Finally for today, the folks at PSFK have spotted a remarkable pair of glasses, which double as a speech-to-text device for the hard of hearing:

"Called 'Babelfish,' the device combines a receptive audio 'listening' process with text to display messages or conversations in the user's line of sight. Speech is filtered through two microphones and visualized through audio translation software on embedded controllers to display the speech as text via two projectors. The device also add an integrated noise-filtering system to discern other sounds from the nearest conversation occurring."

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Sarah Marsh | Reuters | Germany says Apple must improve data transparency
• Lucian Constantin | Softpedia | Several Symantec Websites Vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting
• Jo Wilkes | Broadband Expert | Johnson supports wireless internet access underground
• PSFK | Visual Hearing Aid Projects Speech And Text

• Reuters reports that Dell is in talks over the use of Google's Chrome operating system on Dell laptops:

"'We have to have a point of view on the industry and technology direction two years, three years down the road, so we continuously work with Google on this,' Amit Midha, Dell's president for Greater China and South Asia told Reuters in an interview."

Google's Chrome operating system is expected to launch in the late autumn, and if Dell chooses to install Chrome OS on its computers, it would be a major boost for the rival to Microsoft Windows.

• It took less than a week for a computer whiz to come up with something clever that makes use of newly-available data about London's transport network. The result is a live map of the London Underground, which appears to show in close to real time where every train on the network is located. But as Wired points out, the map can sometimes be amusingly inaccurate, though it's not clear whether that is the fault of the data, or the program written to use it:

"Watch for a few minutes, and you'll no doubt see some of the errors in the data feed - trains travelling far faster than could be possible, or taking wild routes off the track, haring off below parks or housing estates as if they'd suddenly decided that they'd seen enough of the same old boring routes, and wanted to try something different."

Wired's Duncan Geere has admiration for the people running the train network:

"Zooming in close to a busy station such as King's Cross or Hammersmith also reveals some of the difficulties faced by the Underground's controllers and drivers, with trains entering and leaving the station as often as every 5-10 seconds."

• Perhaps fearful that modern technology threatens to make them irrelevant, librarians at the University of Illinois are busy archiving more than a dozen computerised virtual worlds found in games like Doom and Second Life. Project co-ordinator Jerome McDonough explained why to Ars Technica:

"The really simple, one-sentence answer is because games are important. In the United States we're looking at about 80,000 people who are directly employed by the gaming industry and maybe another 240,000 people involved in related, tangential industries that rely on gaming companies for their existence. So just as a monetary phenomenon, games are important. You probably saw the sales for Modern Warfare? We're talking a single game that realized over a billion dollars in sales."

But Mr McDonough said that it's not only monetary value which justifies the efforts of the Illinois team:

"You also can't understand some other parts of our cultural world unless you preserve some of the game world. There's a lot of sort of interpenetration of media. On the importance of preserving a game like Doom - well, if you're preserving something like The Simpsons, you're not going to be able to understand the Doom references that they made visually in a few Simpson episodes unless you've got a copy of Doom sitting around."

We're tempted to say "Cowabunga, dude!"

• For music lovers, there's a new company selling tunes on the internet, which says it donates half of the profits from sales to a number of named charities including Amnesty, Friends of the Earth and the NSPCC. One of Fair Share Music's founders, Lee Cannon, told Music Week that part of the inspiration is a carrot rather than stick approach to illegal file-sharing:

"The music industry needs to motivate people into purchasing music rather than prosecuting people that don't. Our unique music platform is a step forward in the download-to-own market - not only doing good for recording artists and song writers, but is also doing good for a wide range of extremely worthy causes."

• Finally for today, who knows, perhaps YouTube phenomenon applegirl002 will soon be selling records on that site and elsewhere, after signing a recording contract. According to PSFK, she is the first iPhone musician to land a record deal:

"Kim Yeo-hee, a Korean woman best known as applegirl002, has garnered enough viral Internet stardom and following to sign a record deal with a label in her home country. Using iPhones and music-generating apps to accompany her, the classically trained musician has received more than 4.2 million views on YouTube."

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Melanie Lee | Reuters | Dell in talks with Google over Chrome OS
• Duncan Geere | Wired | Live Tube map shows the power of TfL's data
• Matthew Lasar | Ars Technica | The art of archiving virtual worlds
• Eamonn Forde | Music Week | Fairsharemusic charity download site launches
• Daniel Edmundson | PSFK | First iPhone playing musician lands record deal

• The creator of an iPhone app for the popular American radio show This American Life has criticised Apple for its policy towards charitable donations through Apple devices. The company's app terms and conditions prevent organisations from soliciting donations, which Jake Shapiro thinks is a shame:

"Apple is not just preventing app developers from putting 'donate' buttons or any language suggesting that users contribute to charitable causes; it is also cutting off nonprofits from the most powerful direct-payment platform in the mobile marketplace. 1-Click payments are transformative for direct giving, and Apple has tens of millions of users with stored credit cards already accustomed to instant purchases - over 100 million if you add in iTunes users worldwide."

He goes on to argue that Apple gains from public broadcasters and media as a source of material for its devices, but is then denying a major potential revenue source for those non-profit organisations:

"For public media, where contributions from 'listeners like you' are a critical source of revenue, Apple's donation blocking is a particularly acute problem. For one thing, public media content is hugely popular across iTunes and iPhone/iPad - check out the top rankings for NPR, PBS, PRX and other public media podcasts, station streams, and apps. Apple is effectively blocking a major revenue stream to public media while enthusiastically featuring public media content and apps that enhance value for its devices."

• Perhaps this isn't Apple's week. According to Valleywag, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of that popular social network with close to half a billion users has threatened to switch to a Google Android phone, only a short time after getting an iPhone:

"In a post to his Facebook wall, Zuckerberg explained that, within one week of acquiring the device, he's already had to buy landline phone service in order to make calls, and a whole mess of chargers in order to move the Apple device from place to place."

But it seems Mr Zuckerberg may be confused about exactly which iPhone he has. Ryan Tate suggested that Apple might provide the latest fourth edition of the iPhone to Mr Zuckerberg before he switches allegiance, then clarified:

"Kim-Mai Cutler at VentureBeat reports this was an iPhone 4, even though... Zuckerberg says the next-generation device is still in his future."

• A blogger named Zach Kouwe who left the New York Times under a cloud, after copying elements of his reports from the Wall Street Journal and others has been moved on from his next job as well. He had been employed by the Dealbreaker website, which Felix Salmon at Reuters says was another organisation Kouwe had been accused of pinching material from without attribution:

"One anonymous commenter -- and Dealbreaker prizes its commenters' anonymity greatly -- wrote that 'Kouwe e-mailed me the other day to tell me he 'knew' where I worked', and later posted a screenshot of the emails in question. It seems that Kouwe obtained the commenter's email address -- presumably through his privileged access to the commenter login system -- and then emailed the commenter to tell him exactly where he worked."

Felix Salmon points out that Mr Kouwe was not normally inclined to respond publicly to comments on his pieces:

"Kouwe declined to comment on the situation, but it seems that two months of aggressive needling from Dealbreaker's commenters finally got to him. There's no doubt that the commenters on the site -- who are not representative of its readers, and who can be extremely mean -- applied a lot of negative pressure on Kouwe from day one. But at a site like Dealbreaker, commenter anonymity has to be non-negotiable."

• Sticking with e-mail for the moment, NPR has published a list of phrases to avoid using in electronic communications, if you don't want to face investigation if your organisation ever attracts the attention of the authorities. It lists a number of phrases that those lawyers exploring the collapse of Lehman Brothers searched for in 34 million or so pages of documents from the bank. Jacob Goldstein explains that, in addition to a range of technical terms, the lawyers also searched for some pretty general phrases as well:

"One search in particular targeted a bunch of words and phrases that anybody might use in an incriminating e-mail. They are:

• stupid
• huge mistake
• big mistake
• dumb
• can't believe
• cannot believe
• serious trouble
• big trouble
• unsalvageable
• shocked
• speechless
• too late
"

• Finally, for today, enthusiasm for an alternative to typing on touch-screen smartphones. Tapping out messages on glass is not everyone's cup of tea, and after getting a Google Android smartphone, Jeremy Wagstaff found he preferred "predictive text", as commonly installed for typing messages on mobile phones for the last decade or so:

"My wife complained that she could tell when I was using the Android phone over my trusty old Nokia because she didn't feel I was 'so reachable'. By which she means my monosyllabic answers weren't as reassuring as my long rambling Nokia, predictive text ones."

Then Jeremy Wagstaff discovered ShapeWriter software for smartphones, which lets you literally draw the word you're after on the glass, instead of tapping the letters individually:

"Typing 'hello,' for example, is done by starting your finger on 'h', dragging it northwest to 'e', then to the far east of 'l', lingering there a second, then north a notch to 'o'. No lifting of the finger off the keyboard. Your finger instead leaves a red slug-like trail on the keyboard, and, in theory, when you lift your finger off the keys that trail will be converted to the word 'Hello.'

"And, surprise, surprise, it actually works. Well, unless you're demonstrating it to a skeptical spouse, in which case instead of 'hello' it types 'gremio' or 'hemp'."

Or, indeed, if you are an intrepid BBC reporter trying out the software, and get: "Go Jeremy slapped edited is not as good as I explicit it would be", instead of "Hi Jeremy, shape writer is not as good as I thought it would be".

He says that it gets better with practice.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full

• Jake Shapiro | ars technica | Apple's no-donation policy for apps is a cop-out
• Ryan Tate | Valleywag | Facebook CEO disses iPhone
• Felix Salmon | Reuters Blogs | Zach Kouwe fired again
• Jacob Goldstein | NPR Blogs | 23 Things Not To Write In An E-mail
• Jeremy Wagstaff | loose wire blog | The Shape of Things to Come

• China's .cn internet country code has fallen from being the second most popular top-level domain, to fourth place, a year after Chinese registrations were growing so fast it appeared they might displace .com altogether. Darthcamaro reckons it's all to do with junk e-mail:

"So why did .cn decline? Spammers. 'Many of these are low-priced promotional names that have now come up for renewal at a higher price,' Pat Kane, vice president of naming services at VeriSign, told InternetNews.com. 'The .cn registration decline was also based on the CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) registry's implementation of the real names directive from the Chinese government primarily around verifiable 'whois' data.'"

• We're familiar with solar powered garden lights, which tend to give out about enough light to illuminate a small patch of garden path. But a Hong Kong company has now introduced what it claims is the world's first solar-powered light bulb:

"The Nokero N100 solar LED light bulb is meant to replace kerosene lamps as a lighting source in the developing world. The company says 1.6 billion people still lack sufficient access to electricity, and many burn fossil fuels for light, which can be dangerous and expensive."

The idea is that bulb owners leave them out in the sun all day, and then bring them indoors at night, to give up to four hours of illumination on a full charge, although Nokero says that a day of charging in the sun provides about two hours of light.

• The World Cup in South Africa is captivating football fans all over the planet. Now you can see where, exactly, it is gaining most interest:

"The 2010 World Cup is shaping up to be a major Internet milestone event, with billions of fans relying on the Internet for live and on-demand games, news, scores, and highlights of the most watched sporting event in the world. Whether it's watching live streams of the game in HD video or the ability to share stories, photos, and memories at an unprecedented global scale, fans will experience the World Cup like never before. This tool monitors real time traffic to the global broadcasters delivering traffic over Akamai's network."

At the time of writing, Italy seems to have a particularly strong interest in the Cup. Bear in mind that the map is not exhaustive, although Akamai reckons it carries around a fifth of the world's internet traffic.

• In recent weeks we've seen several announcements that unlimited data plans for smartphones are being phased out, on Vodafone, in the US on AT&T, then on 10 June O2 announced that data would be capped at 500Mb or 1Gb depending on your monthly price plan. According to Charles Arthur at the Guardian though, the data-hungry culprits may not be smartphone users at all:

"Closer investigation suggests that this is a sort of collateral damage from the rumblings that preceded the Digital Economy Act - that it's caused by peer-to-peer users who were perhaps worried about the "three strikes" talk, and figured that their landlines (if they have them) might be monitored or throttled if they download a lot of P2P data; or they might be surcharged."

And Arthur reckons a very small number of people have turned a smartphone contract into part of the plumbing for their home PC broadband connection, with a breathtaking impact on the phone networks:

"Those wary folk - put by one network as numbering "in the few hundreds" out of millions - have signed up on "unlimited" plans, taken the SIM out of the phone, and then use it in a 3G dongle to download stuff. Because it's unlimited, they can get what they want. And as they don't mind how quickly it arrives, the speed isn't a particular issue; they're just after volume. O2 says that 0.1% of its smartphone users - that's about 2,000 people - are consuming 36% of its data. Other networks indicate the same."

Finally, it seems some people may be prepared to go to bizarre lengths to get their hands on Apple's iPad. Two men in Arizona face drug supply charges, after allegedly offering an iPod touch and a quantity of marijuana on Craigslist, in exchange for one of the gadgets:

"After receiving a tip about the ad, which included photos of both the iPod touch and marijuana, police officers sent an e-mail purporting to be interested in the exchange. When the police met up under the pretense of completing the trade, 20-year-olds Jacob Walker and Jacob Veldare were instead arrested when Walker offered up the marijuana."

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full
• Darthcamaro | Slashdot | China drops in domain registrations from 2 to 4
• Tim Hornyak | cnet | Solar light bulb to shine on developing world
• Akamai | World Cup traffic map
• Charles Arthur | The Guardian | Why file-sharing has killed 'unlimited' mobile data contracts
• Lauren Indvik | Mashable | Pair Arrested for trying to trade iPod Touch and Marijuana for iPad on Craigslist

• Once upon a time, Apple and Google were the best of friends. But in recent years, as both companies have started to encroach on each other's territory, the relationship has turned a little more sour. John Battelle sees the latest move by Apple, which prevents Google's AdMob ads being delivered on iPhone and iPad apps, as the drawing of battle lines:

"As All Things Digital notes today, Apple this week "clarified" its policy with regard to third party networks, and it's hard to read it as anything other than a direct declaration of war with Google. In short, third party ad networks can run in AppWorld, but only if they are "independent". Put another way, sorry AdMob, you're not welcome here."

Battelle reckons that it will increase development costs for app builders:

"This is all we need now - a major platform war, with marketers and developers having to pick sides, cost of development, ad serving, analytics, and marketing services at least tripled (one process for Android, one for iPhone/Pad/Touch, one for Microsoft or Palm/HP or.... ). That's not what the web is about. It's disheartening."

• Meanwhile, Google may be kicking those fun event-specific logos called Google Doodles off its homepage. The search giant has launched a customisable picture backdrop for google.com, and most visitors to the homepage are now seeing a picture by default:

"It looks as though Google is trying to reach the huge mass of people who like some sort of personalisation. The idea of the image is to show you that you can do this to the home page; if you click on the bottom-left link to "Change background image", you get taken to a page where you have to log in - or create - a Google account. So in that sense, this is another, subtle advert to get people to sign up to Google accounts, while putting Google on an equal footing with [Microsoft's search engine] Bing in terms of how the page looks generally."

So is the background image here to stay forever? Charles Arthur certainly hopes not:

"[The image-based search page] means it's hard to distinguish it from Bing, and it means that Google can't do Google Doodles any more. And you have to agree that the latter would be a loss - far more so, in their educational and amusement value, than the gain to be had from an image."

• Once upon a time, it seemed everyone had to have a character, or Avatar, in the virtual world Second Life. But the world appears to have moved on, and its parent company Linden Labs is laying off 30% of its staff.

"Rumors of the layoffs emerged a few days ago, and paint a more detailed picture of the reductions. The report says Linden Lab closed their UK and Singapore offices, cut the head count of the Seattle office by half, let the enterprise group go, and made staff reductions at their Mountain View and San Francisco offices."

The challenge for Second Life, according to Leena Rao, comes from social networks:

"Second Life's user base has been dwindling and clearly the company is trying to take the virtual world in the direction of social networks, after seeing the popularity of gaming on these platforms. But Linden Lab isn't completely dead. The company was reportedly valued between $658 million and 700 million a year ago. If Linden can turn around Second Life and push the social agenda, the virtual world could rise again. Miracles can happen."

• Chinese hackers appear to have infiltrated tens of thousands of web pages around the world, planting a malicious link into innocent-looking banner adverts, on pages including The Wall Street Journal and Jerusalem Post:

"The sites were infected using SQL injection exploits, which allow attackers to tamper with a server's database by typing commands into search boxes and other user-input fields. The hackers used the exploit to plant iframes in the compromised sites that redirected visitors to robint.us. Malicious javascript on that site attempted to infect end users with malware dubbed Mal/Behav-290 according to anti-virus firm Sophos."

According to Dan Goodin, a group of volunteers quickly managed to take out the destination page:

"Robint.us has been disabled, thanks to a sinkholing effort carried out by volunteer security outfit Shadowserver Foundation. The action will allow Shadowserver researchers to get a complete list of compromised sites and to gather additional information about how the attack was carried out, spokesman Andre' M. Di Mino said in an email. He said the details would be published soon."

• Finally, for today, YouTube faces a big tax bill from Turkey, a country which ironically attempts to ban the video-sharing website altogether:

"'Although the company is not a registered taxpayer, the Finance Ministry has calculated it owes taxes worth 30 Million Lira,' or $18.7 million, Turkey's Transportation Minister Binali Yildirim, whose portfolio includes telecommunications and the Internet, told reporters earlier this week."

According to Thomas Seibert, it all boils down to the fact that Turks can access YouTube, despite the ban. Turkish advertisers have therefore been placing adverts on the site, leading to a tax probe and the multi-million dollar bill. Even the country's leader says he is a fan:

"When Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized the opposition over the controversial issue of the Islamic headscarf in late 2008, he told reporters they should go on YouTube to see for themselves what he meant. Stunned, journalists reminded him that access to the site was blocked, but Erdogan was unfazed. 'I can get in,' he replied. 'You can get in as well.'"

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full
• John Battelle | Searchblog | Apple Kicking Google Out of iWorld
• Charles Arthur | The Guardian | Google's front page gets an image
• Leena Rao | TechCrunch | Linden Lab Lays Off 30 Percent Of Staff
• Dan Goodin | The Register | Mass hack plants malware on thousands of webpages
• Thomas Seibert | NewsTilt | YouTube is asked to pay taxes in Turkey despite being banned

• It seems that 12 hours is a very long time in the iPad App world. As Kara Swisher points out, yesterday morning Steve Jobs praised the developers of the iPad app, Pulse News Reader, at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco.

"But, by the afternoon, that flush of entrepreneurial success had turned sour, after Apple informed the two that Pulse was being pulled from the App Store, after it received a written notice from the New York Times Company that 'The New York Times Company believes your application named 'Pulse News Reader' infringes The New York Times Company's rights.'"

Swisher highlights that even the New York Times had been discussing the success of the Pulse News Reader on its website recently. The App is no longer available, and one of the developers was fairly philosophical about its fall from grace:

"I don't blame Apple, because they have to respond when contacted by lawyers from the Times ... but it was definitely a roller coaster of a day."

• The Register draws a link between the apparent demise of Pulse Reader, and Apple's launch of the latest version of its web browser, Safari 5, which Steve Jobs did not get around to discussing at the WWDC. The new browser has a 'Reader' mode:

"According to Apple, 'Safari Reader removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles... So you get the whole story and nothing but the story.'"

After showing a screen-grab of a New York Times story using the Safari Reader, John Lettice points out:

"The NYT branding is gone, along with the author's byline, the audio accompanying the story, an interactive graphic, social links, everything really. Looks like it could be a number of violations of the NYT's terms and conditions to us, if Apple were doing it. But Apple didn't press the button..."

• Over at The Atlantic, there's an interesting piece which argues that the freewheeling 'Wild West' days of the web, and the supremacy of the web browser, may be numbered, in part thanks to the success of ventures like Apple's App store.

"The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995."

Michael Hirschorn reckons that traditional media companies have contributed to their own demise:

"Ironically, only the "old" entertainment and media industries, it seems, took open and free literally, striving to prove that they were fit for the digital era's freewheeling information/entertainment bazaar by making their most expensively produced products available for free on the Internet."

• Plenty of employers have blocked their staff from using social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter whilst at the office.

But ReadWriteWeb reckons this might change soon, as a firewall company has recently activated a "Read-only" mode for Facebook.

"IT managers using Palo Alto Networks firewalls are now able to switch Facebook into a "read-only" mode, thanks to an update released today. There is no relationship between Palo Alto Networks and Facebook - the changes are all within the customer's network. Previously, managers using Palo Alto Networks firewalls have had the option to block all Facebook apps (but not individual apps) as well as Facebook's e-mail and chat features. The update adds the ability to disable posting, making Facebook effectively read-only."

The article discusses a number of potential uses of the technology, suggested by the firewall firm's marketing director:

One idea he mentions, though he's quick to point out the product isn't currently being used by the military, is limiting soldiers read-only access to social media sites in the weeks before a deployment. This would keep sensitive information from being leaked, but allow soldiers to view pictures and status updates from home.

• Finally for today, a Tennessee man called Brian McCrary apparently bought his local police department's domain name, in response to having received a speeding ticket. Emma Woollacott from TGDaily points out:

"The web hosting company, Go Daddy, had warned the Police Department that the domain was about to expire some three months in advance and several times since. Once the date was reached, the company posted a message on the site warning visitors that it was about to close, and it was this that gave McCrary his idea."

She says that Mr McCrary is now using the site to provide information on the location of speed cameras and offer fellow citizens a chance to gripe about them.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

Links in full
• Kara Swisher | All Things Digital | iPad App gets Steve Jobs's praise in morning...then booted from App Store hours later
• John Lettice | The Register | Apple adds 'make the web go away' button to Safari 5
• Michael Hirschom | The Atlantic | Closing the Digital Frontier
• Klint Finley | ReadWriteWeb | Read-only Facebook Coming to your Company?
• Emma Woollacott | TGDaily | Man swipes police website to complain about speed cameras